The payment or account documents include, for example, bank checks, payment bills, traveler's checks or traveler's checks and money orders, as documents for the transfer of money via Western Union or Money Gram. These documents comprise forms with basic information, primary information and other information printed with magnetic ink (MICR) and obtained by stringent printing specifications. The documents are available for financial institutions and other issuing institutions and are finalized for the payment by addition of sensitive data in data windows provided to this end.
The printing of the sensitive data can be performed by printers on counters for the public which are different from the ones which have generated the basic information and the primary information of the forms. A hand compilation of the document by the end user is also permitted. Therefore the quality of inking of the sensitive data can be poor and the sensitive data could be confused with the background of the document.
When the payment document is forwarded to a bank counter, it is scanned and gives rise to forming an image file in which the image is constituted by a matrix of dots with respective values of color/intensity (pixels). Then, the obtained information is transmitted to a reference bank or other financial institution to complete the process of final payment (compensation control) and storage of the respective data.
To reduce the processing time and limit the information to be transmitted and stored, the scanning can be performed in a gray scale with medium-good resolution, for example of about 200 or 300 dpi. Afterwards, the information is binarized for the processing with automatic machines and recognizing of the sensitive data by means of OCR devices and CAR/LAR decoders. This process is adequate for the basic information and the primary information of the documents but the binarization can lead to the loss of sensitive data, in the case of poor quality of the print.
During controls and checking of the document, the image of the binarized document is suitably displayed, allowing the operator to process the document in manual mode if he or she detects defects or absence of sensitive data in the displayed image. This results in slowing the process of transmission and storage of the document, with increasing of costs.
On the other hand, if the images were captured at high resolution and/or color, the binarization can improve but the required time of the process will result too long with image files of large size and transmission times longer, even in the case of perfectly recognizable documents with less accurate scans. This possibility is also impractical for the equipment currently used and which follow de facto standards which do not provide for the possibility of high resolution scans.
The known data binarization devices can be found inadequate; in particular, for example, when the sensitive data have been printed by dot matrix printers, widely used to obtain multicopy documents in transactions by public counters. The print can be fleeting, especially when the printers have been used ink ribbons next to exhaustion, rendering ineffective the known binarization devices.